President Obama and the ecosystem of denial

America’s resistance to climate reality is like an Altoid Mint: curiously strong. Nowhere else is denial so rampant, so acceptable and so overrepresented in government.

Call me a romantic (you won’t be the first), but I have to think the President of the United States has a role in battling this national psychosis.

No, I’m not waiting for the President to ride in on a white horse and make everything right. (I stopped doing that after Copenhagen). But he shouldn’t allow denialism to flourish in an official Presidential communication void.

….which has been the norm for the better part of President Obama’s first term. Silence isn’t quite as bad as outright denialism, but the combination of the two has proven lethal to the nation’s climate conversation. One political party is off in anti-science la-la land, and the other fears (weakly and incorrectly) that climate doesn’t poll well enough to talk about. They are both filling vital niches in the ecosystem of denial.

Ironically, fossil fuel interests are pushing climate and energy back on to the national agenda, with a firestorm of attack ads on the President. If anybody has enough money to convince the public that night is day, it’s Big Fossil. But persuading Americans that clean energy is bad and science is bunk is a tall order. And by pushing the politicians they support to embrace these extreme positions, they may well be leading their friends in public office to a slaughter.

There’s every reason to believe that political proponents of clean energy and climate reality can win this fight…but only if they’ll fight it.

So it’s encouraging to see the President starting to feel his way back into the politics of climate reality and clean energy. His political team seems to be sensing the tremendous vulnerability of opponents who deny climate science and cozy up to fossil fuel interests.

You have to hope there is a political price to be paid for militant resistance to facts, especially when the fact in question is a civilization-threatening emergency. Given the relentless negativity of politics generally and the Citizens United-juiced 2012 cycle in particular, maybe the only open door back to climate reality is the political exposure of those who shun science and shill for fossil fuel interests.

I’ll take it.

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Much was made of the President’s remarks on climate in his recent Rolling Stone interview – (too much, in my view, and I’m a glass is 10% full kind of guy.) But the President’s comments on climate and the Keystone Pipeline are worth discussing. So I do, here.